The Plan This will serve as a guide to booting Ubuntu (XBMCbuntu in my case) from an iSCSI drive. The Result The boot process for my XBMCbuntu machine follows these steps: The BIOS is configured to PXE boot. The PXE boot process launches iPXE (formerly gPXE). iPXE connects to the iSCSI drive and launches GRUB which is…

How many projects is it okay to start without finishing at least one? It seems I’m determined to find out. I’m currently in the process of finishing a room in my basement which will become my new office/hackerspace. Naturally, I incorporated copious amounts of LEDs into the design. I picked up a couple of reels…

As part of our keyboard project, a friend and I set out to develop a library for the chipKIT to communicate with the TLC5940 LED Driver. The chipKIT, if you’re not familiar, is a 32-bit arduino clone that runs on the PIC32MX family of processors. While Digilent, the company behind the chipKIT, has done a great…

Recently I replaced my home router with an untangle box. Untangle is a Linux server that replaces my home router with an enterprise-grade UTM system. After I had completed setup of my untangle server, I sat down to relax on my Xbox 360 and was greeted with this message: Your NAT type is set to…

A lot has happened on the Keyboard project since I last posted. Let’s get you up to speed. After etching the TLC boards in the last post, we drilled holes for the components and began mounting them. It quickly became apparent that the boards were of less quality than they seemed. The traces were very…

Preamble… I recently purchased a 2011 Macbook Pro. Not long after, I installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty which came with a shiny new Unity desktop. I quickly noticed that while Unity supported my multitouch trackpad out of the box (Kudos Ubuntu team!), there was no way (at least that I could find) to configure the gestures…

As we started formulating our keyboard project, it quickly became apparent that we’d need a handful of circuit boards. Initially, it was my intention to order them from a site like batchpcb.com. Typically, circuit boards are printed in mass quantities, but when you need just one or two copies of a particular board, sites like…

When we began work on this project, we were planning on using an arduino at the heart. However, after some initial tests, we found that the arduino just wasn’t powerful enough to keep up with all of the processing that we wanted to do. A friend pointed us towards the propeller platform. While I wasn’t…